Techlines Today

The Bad in Email

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 3, 2006 ⋅ Tags: communications, email, reading comprehension

The guys over at Central Desktop Blog have a well-thought out piece where they discuss a number of short-comings surrounding email and its day to day use. I think most of us have some level of familiarity with a majority of their points, including:

• Email is NOT Secure
• Group Email is Really Complicated
• Email is Not a Document Manager
• Email Communications Do Not Correspond Priority
• Email is not permission based
• Spam Filtering is better, but still not good enough
• Email does not work well for multi-users

However, I think one point that was missed and definitely worth mentioning here - email (and this holds weight with other text-based communications) suffers from the difficulty in actually relaying what you are trying to say. How many times have you received a response to your email and questioned whether the person on the other end had even a minimal level of reading comprehension? Chances are, you are just as much at fault, indirectly!

Say what? When you’re speaking to someone face to face or even over the phone, a lot of information lies in your delivery. Facial expressions, hand gestures, voice infliction: they all provide context and are just as important in getting your message across as the words themselves. Contrasting, email lacks all of this. Writing an e-mail that your peer will understand the first time, both in tone and in content, takes a considerable amount time, effort, and skill. Haven’t you ever sent out a quick email and later realized the textual tone is abrasive and demanding? I know I’m not innocent in that regards.

Society as a whole has gotten better at this, and I suspect it will continue to increase as the generations that have grown up with IM and Email progress through the corporate world. However, cultural differences on the world-wide-web will exacerbate this point as more and more nations embrace technology in their day to day lives. So by no means are we out of the woods yet!

If you want to be notified the next time I write something please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading!

Related Posts

• Thunderbird POP timeout problem
• ORDB begins returning false positives